


Passing the Review

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Early Days, Early relationship., Gen, character study., pre-Mystrade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-23
Updated: 2014-09-23
Packaged: 2018-02-18 11:35:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2347058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mycroft and Lestrade, and the foundation of their future relationship. More character study and situation study than anything. Once more trying to evaluate the two men as adult professionals in a complicated setting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Passing the Review

He didn’t get to know Mycroft Holmes because of Sherlock, or because they both got caught up in the same case, or for that matter through shared associates or by bumping into each other at a club and having a good night’s shag. Lestrade later realized one did not come to know Mycroft Holmes by any of those routes in any case. Even Sherlock was insufficient basis for more than a cool passing relationship—exchanged nods in the halls of power, murmured phrases like, “Yes, an associate…” Nothing more.

Lestrade came to know him when he was assigned the painstaking chore of investigating him—complete, nit-picking, count-the-freckles investigation set into motion because Mycroft Holmes was becoming something strange and vast and powerful—and MI6 didn’t know whether to embrace him with cries of welcome, or stab him through the heart, decapitate him, sprinkle him with holy water, expose him to the noon-day sun, and scatter any ashes and bone meal that might remain. Not only did they not know if Mycroft was, metaphorically, Dumbledore or Voldemort—they didn’t know if the wanted him even if he were Dumbledore and Gandalf and Glinda the Good all wrapped up and handed to them with ribbons and bells on. So the hidden powers of MI6 muttered and debated in locked rooms, and called the hidden powers of MI5, who joined them, and the entire lot of them drank off quite a lot of good scotch and smoked far too many cigarettes and cigars, and in the end they concluded that before Mycroft Holmes was given any further power over the fate of the nation, he must be investigated. Completely. Utterly….

The first Lestrade heard about it was when he was called by his Met supervisor. She was a sharp cookie, and Lestrade respected her, even if he never told her of his MI5 rank and mission statement. She didn’t need to know, after all. What he did for MI5 folded silently and seamlessly into the things he did for the Met, without conflict…

She sat at her desk, the grey winter sunlight stroking the smooth, severe curve of her smoke-grey hair, picking out the rare silver threads. She had a fake plant on her filing cabinets—Lestrade remembered that detail about her for the rest of his life. When he commented, once, she said, “Can’t keep a plant alive to save my life, but they expect ‘the woman’s touch.’ At least on my file cabinet it’s out of the way, even if it does collect dust.”

It collected quite a bit of dust. Perched in it’s unappealing false-wicker pot, sitting hard in the corner of the room, pushed as far back and as far to the side as it could possibly go, it hunched, forlorn and faded, behind a palisade of manila folders. The dust was so thick it had begun to look like fur.

Her desk, however, was clear and workmanlike. Phone, keyboard and monitor, two neat piles of folders, one coffee mug blazoned with the Met’s coat of arms. She sat behind it, studying Lestrade.

“You wanted me, Ma’am?” She wasn’t an officer who preferred “sir” regardless of gender.

She shook her head. “No. Not precisely. Your services have been requested, DI Lestrade.”

“Hmmm?” He frowned, and stood, shifting from one foot to the other, wondering if he was expected to sit or remain upright.

“Hmmmm. Yes—that’s exactly what I said. Hmmmm. You’re being seconded to MI5, Lestrade.”

He blinked, and frowned. “Why?” The question was out of his mouth before he could consider.

She shrugged. “Not a clue. I apparently don’t rank high enough to be given that answer. Have you any guesses, Lestrade?”

He considered what his answer should be. He was quite sure it should not be, “Oh, yeah, well, I’ve worked for them since before I even worked for the Met.” He didn’t think MI5 or the Met would much appreciate him blurting that out, and it would do permanent bad things to his relationship with his supervisor. After a moment he said, cautiously, “I’ve worked with them a time or two. Clandestine. Off the record.”

“Apparently they think well of your work, then,” she said, mouth tight. Then she sighed, and said, “You’re to call James Bishop, Division L, as soon as you’re somewhere private. In the meantime, you’re relieved of duties with the Met as of the moment you leave this room.”

He nodded, and said, “With luck I’ll be back soon.”

She nodded in return, and moments later Lestrade was on the way to the car park, fishing his mobile phone from his pocket.

And so he found himself working under Daniel Vietri, investigating Mycroft Holmes.

“He’s a loner,” he told his small team, in their first organizational briefing. “First child of Siger and Moria Holmes. Sigur’s the current head of an old county family. Moria’s…suffice it to say she’s brilliant, but failed to arrange to be born as a boy. There wasn’t’ a lot of room for women in mathematics when she was in her prime. She apparently ended up deciding for parenting, instead. Mycroft’s 39. Schooled at home—very, very hands-on Old Family style—until he was thirteen, when it was decided that he and his younger brother might need to actually learn to talk to the madding crowds—so Mummy and Father sent the poor little grubs to Gordonstoun, where they promptly found themselves circled by a ring of shaggy little aristocrats being taught to be hearty and healthy in cleats and footballer’s jerseys. It was unfortunate for all concerned. Mycroft, after quite a number of bloody noses and blacked eyes, escaped by passing every A-Level available with a perfect score over the summer hols, while convincing Mummy and Father that perhaps someplace a bit less, er, gung-ho than Gordonstoun might serve young Sherlock better. He started at Cambridge that autumn, was recruited for encryption work by MI6 before they got past Michaelmas Term, and he’s been going from strength to strength ever since.”

He talked for an hour, all the while clicking through a PowerPoint presentation of surveillance photos collected over the past years, and occasionally charts and graphs of Holmes’ accomplishments, contacts, areas of expertise, and on and on.

Lestrade thought he could have put it much more simply: “He’s apprentice to God, comes just short of the mark in omnipotence and omniscience, and he scares the bloody hell out of us.” But, then, he came close enough in his summing-up. He looked around the room, eyes passing over each of the three faces around the table with him, and said, “Holmes could prove to be the greatest resource we’ve been handed since Turing. Greater, even: he’s brilliant at damned near everything. But we destroyed Turing… We missed the Cambridge Five until it was far too late. We can’t afford to ruin this one, or miss it if he’s already gone bad.” His jaw tightened, then, and he said, simply, “If he’s bad, there would be nothing that could check him beyond a certain point.”

So they began.

Vietri was a profiler and a psych analyst. Lestrade had the training, but his strength was in the field, backed up by strong research skills. Betilla Jenkins was forensic accounting. Avram Abrams was their web researcher—he could build useful profiles out of three social posts, a World of Warcraft background, and two doctor’s visits. Together they took Mycroft Holmes apart, one dry, discrete thread at a time, looking for signs of dirt that didn’t belong there.

“I don’t like his contacts,” Avram said, scowling at a massive interactive spreadsheet system he’d developed to track everyone Mycroft contacted. “I don’t like them at all. They’re bastards.”

“They’re supposed to be bastards,” Lestrade countered. “He’s supposed to work with the people we don’t want to work with—so we don’t have to start wars with them.”

“So they don’t start wars with us,” Betilla agreed.

Holmes was a trained profiler, but he’d started in encryption and moved on to forensic accounting. It was said he could make financial figures dance the minuet. His own finances, though, plodded along, clear and comparatively simple—and when his finances were not simple, the bastard annotated them, footnoted them, and provided useful hyperlinks to public records to clarify what he’d done, and why. He had money of his own from a family trust, he had further funds through eerily intelligent investments that still skirted any sign of him taking unethical short-cuts. His paycheck was modest—actually a grade lower than Lestrade’s. But, then, he didn’t need the money.

He didn’t hunger for fame. He didn’t go mad for sexy young lovers. He visited a clean male professional already vetted by MI6 several times a month….and showed no concern when the man changed professions as he approached middle-age, merely selecting another approved rent-boy. He didn’t fall in love. He didn’t socialize, beyond rare visits to his mother and father.

His only weakness was his younger brother.

“I don’t get it,” Lestrade said, one night, as he reviewed the most recent contact between the two. “The kid’s a prat. Quick as a whip, yeah—and so jealous and competitive it’s a wonder he hasn’t stuck a knife in his big brother yet.”

Vietri grimaced, but continued to study the file in his hands, his reading glasses low on his nose. “Sherlock’s an investigation waiting to happen in his own right…but he won’t stab Mycroft. It would be admitting he couldn’t win against his brother through guile and deception. Only way he’ll kill Mycroft is if he’s reached the complete collapse of his ego: total personality breakdown. Short of that Mycroft is the one person he won’t kill.”

Lestrade looked at Vietri curiously. “You say it like you’re just waiting for Sherlock to kill.”

“Already has,” Vietri said. “Thing is, he kills for us.” He grimaced. “License to kill.”

“Ah.”

“Mmmmm. I’ve recommended they move him out of that spot. He’s turning into the monster he and his brother are both afraid he is. The job’s ruining him. I don’t know if his handlers are going to listen, though.”

“And Mycroft?”

“Different profile entirely. He was seven before Sherlock was born. That’s an entire lifetime. His relationship to the world is that of an only child. His relationship to Sherlock is half-parental---and the guilt that the kid hasn’t turned out better eats at him.”

Lestrade, studying the pale, gentle-goblin face of their subject, couldn’t see it. “They’re like cat and dog.”

“Still trying to raise baby bro…and unable to let go of it.”

“Why not a family of his own, then?”

Vietri just looked at Lestrade.

The truth was, the more Lestrade studied the younger man, the more he made sense. There was a vicious bastard of a first lover in uni, when the boy had barely been of legal age. There was an attempted seduction by a subject Mycroft had been investigating. And, in truth, there was little indication that Mycroft felt safe in relationships. Lestrade kept imagining him at thirteen in Gordonstoun, surrounded by solid, strong young men and women ready to be muscular and hearty at the drop of a hat. He imagined them as highland cattle—shaggy, peering out at the skinny, freckled, carroty beanstalk with puzzled eyes.

There was a picture of Mycroft taken at the school, the one year he and Sherlock had attended. Sherlock had been vertically challenged—short and cute and curly-haired. His brother, standing behind him like a bodyguard, was tall, knobby, gawky, and, yet, still chubby in the face and soft in the tummy. He was sporting a black eye, and he showed none of the signs of considering it an honorable battle wound.

“What makes a loner like that?” Lestrade asked.

“Depends on what you mean. I’d guess he was born, not made—but life didn’t encourage him to change,” Vietri said. “My guess?” He pulled up a set of files. “Sensory awareness is acute, and he’s sensitive to sound, light, and motion. Some sign he may have been slightly dyslexic as a boy—but if so, he’s compensated. The underlying problem will still be there, though, making everything just a bit harder than it ought to be.” He pulled another file. “IQ around 200—up there in the noise, where you can’t trust your readings anyway. That’s never helpful growing up.”

“You’d think smart kids would be smart enough to fit in,” Lestrade said.

“Smart kids like you?” Vietri smiled. “You’re no slouch, but you don’t end up tired and spooked and cranky after half an hour in public. You didn’t spend your first seven years dealing only with adults—and the next five serving as an auxiliary au pair for your baby brother. I doubt Holmes here even knew how exceptional he was until they were fool enough to dump him at Gordonstoun—and by the time he really understood it would have been too late.”

“And after he left?” Lestrade frowned at a candid shot of the man standing on the steps of Parliament, looking into the distance—standing alone. “Come on.”

“You’re missing it. To fit in he’d have to be what people expected…and he never was. To change that much? He’d have to deny his age, his brains, his interests, his sexuality. He’d have to live every second of his life in the closet—and I don’t just mean about being gay. Trying to fit in seems smart, until you work out what the actual sacrifices are.”

“Yeah? What are they?”

“Your soul,” Vietri said. “Nothing less.”

They spent months studying Holmes. Lestrade came to feel like he knew when the other man breathed in, and when he breathed out.

Lestrade was married, then, and the marriage was young enough to feel good…to feel hopeful. Lestrade wanted kids. He wanted to settle back into his work at the Met, knowing his “real” work for MI5 would roll along, as he sent in observation after observation from the street. Someday he was going to finish this review of Mycroft Holmes and get back to his own life. His real life.

One by one they answered all the questions. One by one they satisfied each of their concerns. A piece at a time they put together the puzzle. At last the day came.

Vietri called them all in, on a weekend. He started them off Saturday morning with doughnuts and carafes of coffee and tea, and took them through it all, one more time. They checked off boxes. They developed elegant little phrases to describe the attributes of the man they had observed. In the end he looked at them all, and said, “Ok. Now…. The real question. The only one that matters. Is he clean?”

Betilla nodded. “Clean. I’d swear to it. Finances that would put a Vatican saint to shame.”

“Aim higher,” Lestrade quipped. “The Vatican’s finances don’t bear looking at.”

She laughed, having expected the quip. “Yeah. Well. He could give saints lessons in bookkeeping. So, yeah. Clean.”

“Clean,” Abrams chimed in. “I’d trust him with my life.”

“You may have to,” Vietri pointed out. “If we clear him then the day  _will_ come when he’s making life and death decisions  about you…or about some other poor bastard in the line of fire.”

“I know,” Avram said. “That’s why I want him cleared.” He looked at his hands, at the fingers laced together on the smooth table top. “I don’t want to die, Dan. I don’t want anyone to die. But sometimes it’s going to happen—and I want someone like Holmes making the choices. He won’t willingly waste a single drop of blood. Not civilian blood, and not ours.”

Betilla grunted agreement. “He’s straight,” she said. The three men laughed, abruptly, thinking of the prim, elegant man they’d studied, with his open preference for male lovers. She glowered at them, and said, “Oh, cut it out. You know what I mean. He’s a straight arrow. A straight shooter.”

“He’s sneaky as a fox,” Lestrade growled. “Devious, clever, tricky.”

“For the right reasons,” she said, then narrowed her eyes at him. “Or are you going to vote ‘no’?”

Lestrade shook his head. “No. I mean—I mean, I say he’s clean. In the right way. So, yeah. We clear him.”

Vietri sighed, and nodded, and leaned back in his chair, suddenly supple and relaxed, if weary. “Then we’re done.” He rubbed his hands—big, solid, knob-knuckled hands—over his face. “God. We’re done.” He glanced up at them, his hands folded under his chin. “It was an honor working with you all.”

The mumbled responding compliments.

“Where are they putting him?” Lestrade asked.

“I don’t think the position has a name,” Vietri said. “Consulting genius to the stars? Patron saint of lost espionage causes? I don’t know. I just know from here on in our future is in his hands, not the other way around.”

Lestrade found himself thanking God for that. In the end he’d concluded that of all the people who could be holding his future, he’d feel secure with none more than with Mycroft Holmes.

And he had thought that would be the last he’d hear of the man, other than the sorts of murmured whispers that came from the stratospheric heights of MI6 command, where people were barely even referred to by name, and where identities were all smoke and mirrors.

And then, mere months after the review was concluded, he looked up to find Mcyroft Holmes standing in front of his ratty desk at the Met. Lestrade blinked, grunted, and gestured at the visitor’s chair, unsure what to say to a man he was not supposed to have ever heard of.

“No need for the performance,” Mycroft said, sitting primly. “You’re Lestrade. I’m Holmes. We know of each other. That’s enough, yes?”

Lestrade blinked. “Um…”

“You’ll be wondering why I’m here?”

Lestrade nodded.

“I need someone to help watch over my brother,” Mycroft said. “He’s…difficult.”

Which Lestrade had to concede he was…not that he was supposed to know. But Mycroft seemed to be fully aware of what Lestrade did and did not know.

“Why?” Lestrade said.

“Because he won’t work with me, he can’t work any more with MI6, and letting him waste his time and talents would be criminal,” Mycroft said, suddenly emotional—the first time in hours of videoed surveillance and candid photos that Lestrade had ever seen feeling just break through the façade like that. “He’s wasting himself!”

Lestrade wondered what Sherlock had gotten into since the time of the review—but it didn’t really matter. He knew enough to know whatever trouble Sherlock was in, he’d earned it. That wasn’t the real question. ‘

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “No—I mean, why me?”

Mycroft looked at him with almost blank uncertainty. “Why?”

“Yeah. Me—why me? I mean—yeah, I have some areas of overlap with the kid. But I’m not exactly a jailer. Or a shrink for delinquent brats. Why me?”

Mycroft considered, drew a deep breath, and said, very softly, “Four people recently reviewed me. Four people whose integrity I would trust before any others in MI5 and MI6. You’re…clean.” He met Lestrade’s eyes. “You’re smart, you’re skilled, you’re talented—and you’re  _clean._  And of the four, you’re the only one who can work with him in his areas of interest.” He blinked. “I chose you once because of your integrity and competence. I choose you again for the same reason.”

Lestrade sat stunned. “You… You picked me?”

“I picked all of you,” Mycroft said. “Someone had to review me, and I had to know they’d do it right.”

“Why?”

Mycroft snorted, alight with sudden scorn. “Don’t be stupid,” he said. “It had to be right. I had to know I was clean—really clean. And I had to know that if it ever came up, I could show it. But most of all, I had to know I wasn’t lying to myself about being fit for the roles being offered me.”

Lestrade studied the man in front of his desk, sitting prim and prissy and neat on the not-so-comfortabel chair, his umbrella leaning against his knees. This was, he thought, the most honest man he knew—a brilliant, talented liar, a game player—and a man of blinding honor.

He took a breath, and said, softly, “No promises. If Sherlock and I don’t work out—we don’t. I can’t make it happen. But—I’ll try.”

And he reached out his hand, never knowing how long they would work together—or how close they would become.

 


End file.
